Ken Russell’s film version of Paddy Chayefsky’s only novel, Altered States, is one of the most visionary pieces of early 1980’s cinema. It is a bold exploration into consciousness, religious experience, evolution, and the very meaning of humanity itself. It was also plagued with a number of production woes centering around the strong personalities of Russell and Chayefsky, resulting in the writer ending his involvement with the film and removing his name from the finished product.
The original novel came about from a discussion among friends including Chayefsky and legendary director and choreographer Bob Fosse, among others. Apparently, they were commiserating about their Hollywood struggles when the subject of Dino DeLaurentiis’s King Kong (1976) remake came up. They decided that they should create their own monster movie remake but grounded in some kind of scientific reality. After leaving this gathering, Chayefsky returned home and wrote a three-page treatment of what would become the novel.
Altered States is essentially a modern retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is much more interested in the scientific methods that lead to the separation of the higher and lower selves than Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novella, which focuses on the investigation surrounding Hyde’s crimes, but the essence of exploring the duality of man is at the heart of both. The novel is written with the sparse, efficient prose of a screenplay while remaining highly readable despite Chayefsky’s copious use of scientific and medical jargon. One of the most surprising things about the novel is how closely it resembles the finished film. It would be assumed that a writer like Chayefsky taking his name off the film would be due to the director taking too many liberties with his work, but that does not appear to be the case. It seems to come down to the fact that Chayefsky and Russell just plain didn’t like each other.
Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn was originally attached to direct the film and guided it through most of pre-production, including casting. Apparently because of disagreements with Chayefsky, Penn left the film and producers sought out a visually imaginative director to take over. They decided on Ken Russell, who was known for his strange, but stunning imagery in films like The Devils (1971) and The Who’s Tommy (1975), but not particularly for box-office blockbusters. In retrospect, Russell was the perfect choice for Altered States, a film that relies on hallucinations as a key part of its narrative. In a review of one of his later films, Gothic (1986), author, critic, and notorious crank Harlan Ellison said, “Ken Russell uses film to look at things we not only don’t care to see, but to look at things we don’t even imagine exist.” In the context of the review (collected in the book Harlan Ellison’s Watching) this is a high compliment as Ellison names Russell one of only a handful of, then-living, true geniuses of filmmaking alongside the likes of Buñuel, Kurosawa, Fellini, Kubrick, and Coppola. As with the company named, Russell had a singular vision and was not willing to compromise it.
“I don’t think Paddy had ever been involved with a director who wasn’t malleable,” Russell told the New York Times in early 1981, “he would make suggestions and I would listen courteously, and then disagree.” Other sources, including the film’s producer Howard Gottfried say that Russell worked well with Chayefsky during pre-production, then became quite cruel once filming began. Whatever the reality, Chayefsky, always involved in the filming process since his first major film Marty (1955), left the production, replaced his screenplay credit with the pseudonym Sidney Aaron, and refused to ever even see the movie. It is possible that Chayefsky felt he should have directed the film himself. It was clearly a personal work for him and his criticisms of details like lighting and color schemes on sets would suggest a desire for the director’s chair. By that time, he had received his third screenwriting Oscar for 1976’s Network (the other two being Marty and 1971’s medical satire The Hospital); making the leap to directing seems like natural step for a writer so deeply involved in the filmmaking process. The whole story may never be known, but the film was now firmly in the hands of Ken Russell.
The movie itself wastes no time in introducing its characters and situations. The film’s plot and dialogue are delivered at breakneck speed in favor of taking time with its more visual and esoteric elements. We are immediately introduced to Dr. Edward “Eddie” Jessup (William Hurt) and his assistant Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) as Jessup is experiencing his first venture into a sensory deprivation tank. After emerging from the tank, Jessup comments that he hallucinated during the experiment—mostly religious imagery from the book of Revelation. Arthur also tells him that Jessup seemed to be reliving the death of his father, something Jessup does not recall experiencing. Later, during a party at Arthur’s home, Jessup meets Emily (Blair Brown), a young Ph.D. candidate, and the two begin an affair. In these early scenes, we learn that Jessup saw religious visions as a child, but dispensed with God after the long, painful death of his father to cancer. He now studies schizophrenics because of the intensity of their religious experiences. The film often relates religious ecstasy to sexual ecstasy as well as the euphoria of scientific discovery.
Early on a key scene occurs. Emily asks Eddie to get married. He avoids the question and resists at first, saying that she doesn’t know what she’s getting into by being involved with him. But Emily proves to be more than aware of who Jessup is, and puts forward her best argument for their union. “You are a Faust-freak, Eddie. You’d sell your soul to find the Great Truth. Well, human life doesn’t have great truths. We’re born in doubt. We spend our lives persuading ourselves we’re alive. And one way we do that is we love each other, like I love you.” Jessup’s greatest problem is that he is incapable of an act so simple and unintellectual as love. His response is essentially that he doesn’t think he can do better than Emily, so he agrees to get married. Emily feels that is the closest she will ever get to a declaration of love from him.
Flash forward several years and two children later (one of them Drew Barrymore in a “blink and you’ll miss it” role as their daughter Margaret) and Jessup reveals to Arthur that he and Emily are splitting up. He is heading to Mexico to pursue a hallucinogenic mushroom he has recently learned about and she is travelling to Africa with the children to study primates. The key thematic scene comes right after this. Jessup explains the nature of memory and what he calls the true, original self. “Memory is energy, it doesn’t just disappear. It’s still in there. There’s a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses…I think that that true self, that original self, that first self is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing, tangible and incarnate…and I’m gonna find the fucker.”
The sequences of Jessup’s quest for the original self are where Russell’s talents as a unique visionary come into greatest play. The hallucination in the Mexico desert is bizarre and spellbinding. I have never personally been under the influence of a hallucinogen but Altered States on multiple occasions makes such an “impossible to film” subjective experience feel very real. According to Russell, these also appear to be the only moments in which he took many liberties from the screenplay. Again for the New York Times article, Russell said, “we shot every word that Paddy wrote except for some trifling changes in the Mexican sequences…in fact, I was more faithful to the script in ‘Altered States’ than in any previous movie, and I think I did it great justice.” The visions shown in the hallucinations throughout the film are unforgettable—the seven eyed, seven horned sheep’s head on a man’s crucified body, fish swimming in a cloudy sky, surrealistic desert landscapes with incongruously colored skies, Emily in a lizard’s pose turning into a pillar of salt—but all serve the purposes of theme and story.
The film is surprisingly restrained in revealing the truly bizarre elements of the narrative: the externalization of Jessup’s hallucinations and regression to a protohuman form. He is brought out of a session in the sensory deprivation tank unable to speak and with blood on his face—from the goat he was eating in his vision. X-rays on his head and neck reveal a physiological change into what he calls a “quasi-simian creature” or ape-like form. From there, things really get weird. We also get the opportunity to see some of the great make-up effects artist Dick Smith’s wizardry. In a partial transformation scene, we get an early look at a technique that would be called revolutionary a year later in An American Werewolf in London: the use of air bladders to denote painful change in human physiology. It remains a startling effect to this day and would be used so memorably throughout the 80’s in films like The Howling (1981), Scanners (1981) and The Thing (1982) among many others.
For all its wild imagery, hallucinatory trips, religious, evolutionary and scientific exploration, Altered States’ greatest theme is the most basic in all of art, literature, music, and film. Ultimately, the early conversation with Emily and the film’s final moments reveal what Jessup truly needs in order to find the original self, his true self. It all comes down to that most rare and essential of human experiences—to be loved and to love in return. The one thing that has been so elusive to him is what has been staring him in the face all along. It may sound corny, but it is also the most basic of all human needs. For the core of our humanity to be something so pure, so simple, but often so difficult to live out is rather elegant. It is beyond the instinct of his primitive incarnation, out of the reach of his intellect, and something his future evolutionary self cannot grasp. Even his most purely human form cannot truly know himself or even be himself without it. But with love and the admission of love, there he finds his humanity—his true self. As do we all.
Works Cited:
Buckley, Tom (1981, January 16). AT THE MOVIES; Ken Russell on ‘Altered States’ controversy. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com
Ellison, Harlan “Harlan Ellison’s Watching [Second Series], The Kilimanjaro Corporation. 1986. Edition Published Open Road Media, Inc. New York, NY. 2014